Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
I was lucky enough to see a talk by Barbara Liskov, the grande dame of computer science. The talk was titled “The Power of Abstraction,” and it covered Liskov’s work on programming languages in the 1970s and 1980s, primarily a language called CLU. Update 1/14/2010: Video of the same talk is available here: OOPSLA Keynote:…
Data formats are annoying. As much as half the code in any large software project consists of translating from one data representation — objects, SQL tables, files, XML, RDF, JSON, YAML, CSV, Protocol Buffers, Avro, XML-RPC — to another. Each format has its own strengths and weaknesses. Often, no single representation is complete enough to…
I’ve been fascinated with RDF for years, but I always end up frustrated when I try to use it. How do you read/write/manipulate RDF data in code? Sure, there are lots of libraries, but they all represent RDF data as its primitive structures: statements, resources, literals, etc. Working with data through these APIs feels like…
My Hadoop World NYC talk went off well; here are my slides [PDF]
Hello, everyone. I’ll be performing my Clojure+Hadoop magic tricks at the following events: Friday, October 2: Hadoop World NYC. Use the code hadoopworld_friend for 10% off the registration fee. Monday, October 5: NoSQL NYC Meetup. Free! At both events I’ll be talking about: Why Clojure and Hadoop are a perfect fit. How to write Hadoop…
I’ve said It’s About the Libraries, and indeed, one of the major selling points of Clojure is that it can call Java libraries directly. But there’s more to it than that. Libraries are just one benefit to building Clojure on top of Java, or, more accurately, on top of Java the platform. Look around you,…
I hope I’ve demonstrated in the last few posts that Maven is pretty cool, not so scary. But the public Maven repositories sometimes leave a bit to be desired. They don’t have entries for every possible library, and occasionally they have incorrect dependencies or other metadata. Also, the process of adding new libraries to the…
I promised, in my previous post, that I would show you how to use the latest-and-greatest versions of Clojure and clojure-contrib in your Maven projects. Here’s that post. Formos Software maintains a Maven server with nightly builds of Clojure and contrib at http://tapestry.formos.com/maven-snapshot-repository/ Here’s a complete pom.xml file with dependencies on both Clojure and clojure-contrib:…
Update Sept. 4: How to get the latest builds of Clojure & Contrib Maven is a touchy subject. People tend to have strong opinions about it. But like it or not, it’s the de-facto standard for dependency management in the Java world. Clojure lives in the Java world, so that means we have to live…
Update Sept. 3: Maven’s Not So Bad. A lot of Ruby types come to Clojure and ask, “Where’s the package manager?” The answer is usually, “Maven or Ivy,” which isn’t really an answer. I discussed this in the latter half of my Philly Lambda talk (PDF slides). The problem is that Clojure is built on…